Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Duration of edit-a-thons: 91% lasted less than 8 hours

New support material for program organizers: Evaluation report about edit-a-thons, and a pattern library

A new report about edit-a-thons includes data from 46 events between February 2012 and October 2013. It starts a series of seven reports about the most common types of programs executed by Wikimedia program leaders around the world, authored by the Wikimedia Foundation's Program Evaluation and Design team. This is the first time that such an analysis compares the outcomes of a specific program to its costs. Among the many findings of this report is that edit-a-thons with a small budget can be as productive as events with a large budget.

In the new learning pattern library on Meta, Wikimedians can share what they learn about organizing activities like edit-a-thons, GLAM collaborations, gender gap outreach, or Wiki Loves Monuments. Each pattern includes a description of a common problem, and instructions for solving it.

Screenshot of the new Beta Features preferences page

"Beta Features" option allows users to test upcoming software changes

A new "Beta Features" section has been added to the user preferences menu, allowing logged-in editors to test upcoming software changes and give feedback to the developers, before these features become available for everyone.

Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India

Together with Red Hat, the Wikimedia Foundation's language engineering team organized the fall 2013 Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India. It was also attended by members of the VisualEditor and Mobile teams. Session topics included:

improving the support for fonts (in particular in Indic languages)

input methods for entering characters that are not available on a user's keyboard

a prototype for a user interface for translating Wikipedia articles and other content

OAuth extension makes it easier to use third-party editing tools

All Wikimedia wikis now supportOAuth, an open standard that allows users to authorize third-party software tools to carry out actions on the wiki on their behalf, without handing over their user password. Among the first tools that use this new feature is "CropTool", which allows users to crop images on Wikimedia Commons.

A visualization of the interaction between a third-party tool (left), the wiki and the user under the OAuth protocol

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for October:

530 million (+4.86% compared with September; +8.62% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Other highlights from the Wikimedia movement

Logo for the 10th anniversary of Wikisource

Tenth anniversary of Wikisource

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Wikisource on November 24, proofreading contests were held on the Italian, the Catalan and the English Wikisource, contributors answered interviews (here in English and in French). On the same day, the official recognition of the Wikisource Community User Group was announced. Since Wikisource was founded in 2003 (initially named "Project Sourceberg"), its volunteers have proofread 1.4 million pages in 63 languages.

A scanned page from the Viswakosh

Indian university releases encyclopedia under a free license

The "Konkani Vishwakosh" is a four-volume encyclopedia written in Konkani, a language spoken primarily by people living in Goa and in the neighboring states on the western coast of India.

At the suggestion of Access to Knowledge (A2K, a program supporting Wikipedia in India, run at the Centre for Internet & Society and funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation), the publisher of the "Konkani Vishwakosh", Goa University, released it under a Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0). This is part of a three-year effort to build the Konkani Wikipedia. The 3632 pages of the Vishwakosh are being digitized by 37 volunteer Wikimedians.

Diversity Conference

On November 9–10, over 80 Wikimedians attended the first Wikimedia Diversity Conference, hosted by the German Wikimedia chapter in Berlin. Many of the presentations addressed Wikipedia's gender gap (the fact that the large majority of contributors are male). But other aspects of diversity were a topic as well, e.g. geographic diversity (the under-representation of editors from the Global South) or LGBT issues.

A Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first video game console (1972), photographed by Evan Amos

Evan Amos (User:Evan-Amos) is a video game enthusiast who has been uploading high-quality photographs of gaming consoles to Wikimedia Commons since 2010. He has now started a project to expand this into an online collection about the history of video games, called "The Vanamo Online Game Museum". He presented the idea on Kickstarter, a fundraising site, and received over $17,000 from more than 1,000 donors in little less than a month. The money is dedicated to buying old video game hardware so that it can be photographed.